Ladies and Gentlemen

by Adam Ross

  But because there was so much of the play I didn’t understand, so many basics, I needed his help. What was the Talmud? Gematria? Zionism? Smicha? It was like Abe’s bar mitzvah, but without Abe. It was overwhelming, like reading through Swiss cheese. My father couldn’t explain a lot of it, which was fine. I could accept all the unfamiliar terminology, but what I found most confusing was how Reb Saunders refused to talk to Danny.

  “He’s training him,” my father explained. “He’s training him to become a tzaddik.” We were taking a cab home, something my father splurged on only after a full day of work. It was well past six and the traffic was bad. When my father said tzaddik, he stressed the first syllable, making a sound like ts and then pronouncing the z.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like a religious leader. That’s what Reb Saunders is. He’s a powerful rabbi.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So he’s a Reb.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What about Nu?”

  “Nu. It’s Yiddish. Let’s see. Nu is like … it’s like the word ‘well.’ You’d say, ‘Well, when do we eat?’ Some Jews say, ‘Nu, when do we eat?’ ”

  “So why not talk to him?”

  “Reb Saunders? To Danny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he wants his son to suffer. He expects his son to take his place one day as tzaddik, and only someone who has suffered can feel the pain of the people he leads.”

  I thought about this for a while. “You made a good Reb,” I told him.

  My father turned to me, smiling appreciatively. “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad you and I talk.”

  “I am too.”

  “Nu,” I said, “what about kike?”

  My father did a double take. “That wasn’t in the show.”

  I told him Kyle had called me one, but it wasn’t a big deal. When they got into fights, he called Abe that too.

  My father considered this silently, then asked the driver to take us once around the park.

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a nasty word for Jew.”

  “Have you ever been called one?”

  “Yes. In the navy.” The memory seemed to shake him. My father had been a naval photographer on a destroyer during Korea, though from what he’d told me it seemed his convoy spent all of its time in Greece. “A lot of the Southern guys said it. Though most of the time they called me Burger.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my name.”

  I waited.

  “Rosenberg,” he said. “Rosenburger.”

  “Check.”

  My mother was from the South. We spent every Christmas in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family. My grandfather was a colonel, and at night he and my father drank Wild Turkey, which my grandfather poured out first into a measuring cup (“He’s a diabetic,” my mother tried to explain). Last year, after a dinner filled with talk about the upcoming presidential election, my father and I had gone on an errand to the supermarket for my grandmother, and he said to me, “Just so you know, I hate it down here. I hate all of these people.” Now I understood why.

  “When they called you kike, what did you do?”

  My father smiled. “I took their picture.”

  “Why?”

  “It calmed them down. It made them nice. I’d say, ‘Bubba, let me take your picture. I’ll send a copy to your mom. Or your girl.’ ”

  “What did they call you after that?”

  “After that they called me Nate.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “Nate?”

  “Kike.”

  “That’s an interesting question. I asked my father that once.” My grandfather, Zada, a man I’d never met, was already long dead. Babu, my grandmother, lived alone in Los Angeles. She and Zada had moved there when my father was fifteen, leaving him behind in New York with his uncle so he could attend Music & Art high school. I knew next to nothing of her either—I’d met her once—except that she was from someplace in Russia or Poland that I couldn’t find on a map and had fled to America because of pogroms, which for years I thought were a race of people. For my birthday, she unfailingly sent me a $25 check in a Hallmark card. “He told me that it comes from the Yiddish word kikel. That means ‘circle.’ Jews, when they came to America, they signed their immigration papers with a circle instead of an X.”

  “Why?”

  “Because X is the sign of Christ.”

  My father sounded like Reb Saunders explaining this. I was impressed by how much he knew.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “the men on Ellis Island who registered them began calling them kikels, which then became kike, I guess.”

  “What did your dad do?”

  “He was a furrier. He made furs. For coats.”

  “Did he make money doing it?”

  “No, he was always broke.”

  Our cab drove up the long hill at the northernmost end of the park.

  “What is a Jew?” I asked him.

  He waited for a long time. “What do you think it is?”

  I thought for a while. I couldn’t say why, exactly, but when I imagined a Jew, I always pictured Abe’s father. There was a photo of him in Abe’s bedroom that I loved. He was in his infantry uniform, leaning against a lightpole smoking a cigarette. He had the coolest black moustache. Though his family had fled Germany before the war, many of their relatives had been killed. He was sixteen when he arrived in America and immediately enlisted in the army, lying about his age, “so he could kill Nazis,” according to Abe. He had a scar over his right eye from when a Nazi sergeant kicked him in the face one day on the street when he was ten years old. Mr. Herman later captured this same Nazi behind enemy lines, tied him up, and “beat the living shit out of him,” also according to Abe. But many years later, Mr. Herman himself told me he’d put two bullets in the man’s head: “two eyes for an eye.” He had a ton of these stories, though in truth I thought of Mr. Herman as a Jew mostly because I couldn’t go to Abe’s house on Fridays or during Passover, when his family withdrew and their apartment became a kind of impregnable fortress. I did get invited that December for the lighting of their menorah, when again Abe sang in Hebrew (which I thought must be the same as Yiddish). He put on his yarmulke and chanted at the candelabra, and perhaps because we all stood so close around him he seemed oddly self-conscious, less sure of himself than during his bar mitzvah, and he occasionally fumbled the words, a rarity for Abe. “If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar,” declares a writer I love, “we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all.” I read this in college and felt angry with my father for leaving my Jewishness to me; I remember thinking I was doomed to live a life without spiritual direction or shape—but I no longer accept that, at least not completely. It is to the memories of Abe’s chanting, of Kyle’s apartment, of Elsa’s tiny mouth, of my father’s voice (“He,” referring to Elvis and the tenth anniversary collector’s set, “was the King!”)—it is to these that I am bound back.

  “A Jew is someone who knows things,” I said.

  “Like?”

  “Like what to sing.” Then I thought of Mr. Herman enlisting. “Like what to do.”

  “You know,” my father said, “I was a cantor when I was your age. A singer in synagogue.”

  “You know all those words?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Why did I stop?” my father repeated. “I stopped because everywhere we went, my father was always making me sing.”

  My father didn’t sing much anymore, though one of my earliest memories was of watching him perform on television. It was The Young People’s Concerts, hosted by Leonard Bernstein, and the opera was Beethoven’s Fidelio. He played Rocco, singing in German, and that he could speak another language amazed me. When I asked my mother why he didn’t speak it
at home, she said he couldn’t. He’d just memorized the sounds.

  “He wanted that to be my career,” my father continued. “My life. We had terrible fights about it.”

  My father and I never fought. I loved him. He was kind. He had a beautiful voice. And we looked exactly alike. He looked, as I think back now, like a Sephardic William Shatner, and tonight I didn’t fear our similarity or think of it as a curse. I wanted to be just like him.

  “Why was that so bad?” I asked.

  “To be a cantor?” He shook his head. He had the same bewildered look on his face as he did, years later, when late one night I found him staring blankly at the living room wall. Money, I didn’t know then, was worse than tight—all the voice-overs, the career-making national accounts, the GEs, AT&Ts, and Friskies Buffets were going to the Donald Sutherlands, Demi Moores, and Lauren Bacalls of the world, to people, it was reasoned, you subconsciously recognized. “Nu,” he answered softly, “I don’t know now.”

  We’d do one more loop around the park, though silently this time. We passed the Tavern on the Green, and through the brilliant glass windows I could see a group of waiters gathered around a table and singing—“Happy Birthday!” I guessed. My father had taken me there, too, when I turned thirteen.

  Kyle and I made up, of course. Boys can’t stay mad at each other about girls for too long. That’s a job for men.

  And one day, Elsa softened toward me.

  It happened at BBDO, a big ad firm on the East Side. The main office was shaped like an enormous circle, with a wide spiral staircase running down the center—a compass rose with multiple rooms around its circumference out of which simultaneous auditions were run. It was a bustling place in the afternoons, and it wasn’t surprising to step off the elevator to see, say, a herd of leggy models so beautiful they seemed a separate species of person, tightly packed on the couches by the receptionist’s desk; or twins of every shape, color, and size; or Dwarfs, Little Nerds with Big Glasses, Cute Old Ladies, mothers with Angelic Infants, or Black People. This time it was Teenage Couples.

  Nor was I surprised to occasionally run into my father at these calls, and sure enough he’d had an audition himself that day. I could see the group of voice-over men, sides in hand, each one sitting a chair apart from the others, silently mouthing lines to himself. My dad was standing in front of the receptionist’s desk, talking with one of the casting agents before leaving. These were usually women of a certain type. They wore low-cut, tight-fitting tops; eyeglasses, whether they needed them or not; jeans tucked into leather boots; shoulder-length hair down to what Abe called their mom’s-aged asses. They looked old but seemed younger in their brazenness, in their willingness to ignore fundamental rules of engagement—for example that my father was married, or that I was right there. When I came across him with these tan, raven-haired, braceleted women, they stood close and touched his arm or chest when he made them laugh. They took him by the chin and kissed his mouth to say good-bye—and he let them! This made me hate them and him enough to scream, but I always remained silent at dinner that night with my unwitting mother and brother. It had happened, I thought, after our talk, because my father wasn’t a Jew. And when I saw him on this particular day, I added a word to my definition of what a Jew was: committed.

  “This must be your son,” the woman said.

  “It is.”

  “You look exactly alike,” she told me.

  Elsa appeared out of nowhere.

  “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “Quick, I think I’ve got it figured out.” She took me by the hand—hers was as dry as snake-skin—and hustled me over to the sign-in sheet. She counted off the names on the list, crossed out one person’s, and rewrote it at the bottom. She had me write mine, then hers, right below it. “Now,” she ordered when we sat down together, “don’t you dare leave my side.”

  She was so flustered it was hard to get her to explain what was going on, so instead I asked what the audition was for.

  “It’s for Big Red chewing gum. Open your mouth.” I did as told, and she squirted me with Binaca. “We have to kiss.”

  You see, Elsa whispered, there were some ree-ly gross guys here, and no way was she going to kiss some putrid stranger. “So when in doubt,” she said, “stick to what you know.”

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  “Meaning you, douche bag. I know you.”

  We sat there for a moment. Grateful, she knocked her shoulder to mine. “Plus if you were older, you’d only be half bad.”

  I laughed. I was the youngest boy there by far, but Elsa clung to my arm as if we’d been in love since grade school. Our names were finally called, and we entered the room. The casting agent stood behind a video camera and a klieg light, and when we stepped onto the slightly raised platform that functioned as a stage, she told us that on “three” we were to say our names directly into the lens, then turn to each other. On “action,” we would kiss until she said “cut.”

  “And it has to be a passionate kiss,” she emphasized. “The kind that makes me taste the Big Red gum in your mouths.”

  Like I said before, I was thirteen years old and on the cusp of many things: regret, for instance; wrong turns; manhood; disappointments galore. But I did something in that room that day that I’ve come to recognize is so rare as to be precious: I got in the moment. After we announced our names, the woman told Elsa to let her hair down. Elsa turned to face me and shook out her ponytail, and I watched her unabashedly while she teased it into a mane. The casting agent was only a voice to us, invisible behind that floodlit wall, so it was like being alone anywhere I could imagine, which was nowhere else than where I was right now.

  “How do I look?” Elsa asked.

  “You look good,” I answered, and stared at her little mouth and then into her eyes.

  “I’m warning you,” she said. “No tongue.”

  “No tongue,” I repeated, though I had no idea what she meant.

  “And not a word of this to Kyle.”

  “Not a word,” I agreed.

  “So far as I’m concerned,” she said, “this never happened.”

  “Right, it never happened.”

  But then it was happening, my dream suddenly laid out on a platter like John the Baptist’s head.

  “Easy squeezie,” she said, trying to calm herself.

  “Easy,” I answered. But already edging toward her, I was able to smell her now—my ear bent to the call for action.

  Ladies and Gentlemen

  The hotel room’s curtains seemed to be burning too brightly at the edges, and Sara cursed when she saw the digital clock next to her bed. Her flight out of Nashville, bound for Los Angeles, left at 7:30; it was 6:49. She’d managed to catch several flights over the years in miraculous fashion, but this would really set the record.

  Luck, however, was on her side. A taxi was waiting for her when she arrived in the lobby, traffic was light out to the airport, she stepped right up to the e-ticket kiosk, and the security line moved so efficiently that she even had time to stop at Starbucks, texting her husband while the barista made her café au lait. New Yorkers like her lived for this sort of synchronicity. When the subway arrived the moment you stepped onto the platform or all the lights down Park Avenue switched to green as your cab approached, it felt as if you were somehow being watched over. The Southwest attendant was about to close the door when Sara stepped onto the plane.

  She wasn’t surprised to find most of the seats taken. She hated to sit in back, where the turbulence was most acute, and on principle refused to share her seat with any overlapping parts of a fat person. She certainly wouldn’t sit next to anyone with a baby; she had two sons of her own and had suffered through enough hellish trips with Tanner and Rob to make her sympathetic, but only from afar. Her supreme pet peeve, however, was a middle seat, and the attendant in back, already buckled in, was pointing to one that also happened to be in the last row. Mr. Window, hidden behind his newspaper, was clearly very tall, and Miss
Aisle was Hispanic, in her early twenties, and already fast asleep.

  As if sensing her preference, Mr. Window lowered his paper and offered Sara his seat the moment she appeared. He was getting off in St. Louis, he said, but “they’re full all the way to Los Angeles.” The man was Gumby-thin and broad-shouldered. He didn’t stand so much as unfold, broadening and elongating like one of her son’s Transformers. Their exchange, followed by his help jamming her bag into the overhead bin, momentarily woke Miss Aisle, who stared at them uncomprehendingly, until Mr. Window, in another pleasant surprise, said, “Disculpe, señora. Le voy a dar mi silla.”

  “De nada,” she answered, and got up.

  The plane backed out of the gate the moment Sara got settled and, in keeping with this morning’s magical timing, made a beeline for the runway and took off without delay.